Thursday, 16 July 2009

Sales in the iPhone App store have amazed a lot of people. Together with the popularity of the iPhone, or the other way round, the iTunes app store’s sales have rocketed sky high. Around 3000 apps per minute are sold online. A great success for Apple, and even though we are apple fans here, why should this feature on the blog? Well, interesting is the visualization that has been produced to impress visitors at this years WWDC 2009. A massive Hyperwall with 16 screens shows the live sales directly from the app store (some 5 min delay).

This visualization is fascinating because it shows the rather virtual activity of the iTunes store. People are downloading applications for their iPhones/iPod touch’s in thousands per minute. The wall visualized live which of the 20’000 most popular app is sold with a blink of this apps icon. The screen is ordered according to colour that makes it look nice, is otherwise probably not helpful. It shows the variety of apps and starting to categorize them would probably only end in a very confusing table with sub tables. As it is live one could probably stand there and buy an app and watch the icon go blink. I can imagine that this could become addictive. The time in visualization has always been, but has recently become much more important. It still is a very difficult element to usefully integrate, but in this case it serves brilliantly the purpose.It needs a lot of processing power, as you have read above in apple’s statement. 20 Mac Pro towers are running for this visual, very impressive.

Experiments have also been undertaken by the MIT sensableCity lab. Their best known example is probably the Rome Real TIme work for the Biennale. They were using six different types of real time visuals to draw a comprehensive picture of the city. The data came live from the Italian Telephone company where sent to the US to the MIT lab to be processed and be made available as a download for the mobile stations in Rome. Not strictly real time but with some 10min delay still fairly quick. A similar project was run on Obama’s inauguration day in Washington earlier this year. See earlier post on this blog, but in this case it was not processed immediately.

About this blog

Cycle studies are the science of everyday life, as normal as it gets. Its focus is the daily routine, with its habits and rhythms as they occure in most citizens' lifes. It is the power of the normal that brings stability and the routine that ensures security. But is is the cycles's dynamic of flow and continuation that prevents life from freezing.

Cycles therefore stand for stability but are at the same time the engine of change.

With this blog the research on cycles and rhythms will be embedded in the most recent developments in technology, covering a range of areas with a focus on space-time related technologies.

The research is undertaken at CASA Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL.